A staircase at the end of this chapter illustrates the comfortable easy landings and flights that characterise old house architecture, even when on an unpretending scale. The date is about 1600, and the comfort of ascent is far beyond any staircases that we should expect to find in a moderately-sized house in the present day.
An architect of some eminence, in reading a paper on Gloucester Cathedral, said (a few years ago), “I raise my voice against what I consider cankers in modern architecture, where art is so far forgotten in the desire of the architect to obtain for his works a so-called individuality. This individuality is enticing to very young men, who are attracted by the eccentricities of old buildings, or the architect who imports them, for nearly all modern individuality arises from too strongly emphasising and repeating _ad nauseam_ some odd bit picked up in foreign travel. It so happens that many architects have no faith in good sound building, they have no trust in the grandeur of stability, they have no love for simplicity, no appreciation for breadth of treatment: they go in for quaintness.” So far as this is intelligible, it means to say that a broad row of houses without individuality is preferable to one where the individual tastes and requirements of the owner are conspicuous. The same writer proceeds to object to the early capitals that distinguish the Gothic of the twelfth century when clustered round a column, and, as he says, “wrap it round a shaft nearly as big as an Irish round tower.” He objects also to the “dog-tooth” and the undercut capitals that often appear in such profusion in France, and which he compares to “exaggerated sticks of rhubarb,” and warns his junior hearers against ornamenting spires with crockets like Salisbury, which he says in that building can only be called a “positive mania” on the part of the architect, and he proclaims loudly against the enrichments in Hereford and Gloucester. Regarding the latter, he says that a contemporaneous monk grumbled at the expense, and recorded his objections in some record that remains. Whether the monk who regretted the waste was the one that carried the bag or not seems not to be very clear; but in a word, the criticisms are quite unjust. And as for Salisbury, though some may consider that the spire is too thin, there can be no exception taken to its beautiful enrichments. The monk who is quoted with approval seems to have said that as much was spent in ornamenting the church as would have built another. Quite so; indeed the cost of any cathedral would build not one more but many, quite a colony of meeting-houses with 9-inch brick walls. “The basest beggars,” says Lear, “are in the poorest thing superfluous.” This paper is by a well-known architect, and was published some few years ago in the _Building News_, or else it would not be noticed.